What can Europe expect from Obama part two?

A transatlantic trade agreement looks even more important in the modest context of the rest of the US-European relationship

European Voice

By

4/10/13, 9:45 PM CET

Updated 4/13/14, 12:56 AM CET

I am in Washington, DC, this week, trying to find out what Europe should expect from the second administration of President Barack Obama. The short answer is: not much. It is easy to see why. Can Europe help the United States in dealing with North Korea? Or with China? No. Or with cyber-security? No. Or with the Middle East? Also no. Iran? A little. Or with any of the really big questions piling up on the president’s desk? Not really. The message to Europe is polite and dismissive: please take a seat and the protocol office will be along shortly.

The big exception to this is the transatlantic free-trade deal. As well as all the practical benefits this could bring in trade and investment, it also has the potential to revive and transform the Atlantic alliance in the public mind. A generation is growing up in Europe that has little memory of the Cold War and of the stupendous contribution that the US has made in the past to the continent’s security and freedom. For them, the US evokes foreign military misadventures and the over-zealous policing of international copyright law. The entertainment industry and its lawyers have replaced the military-industrial complex and the CIA as bogey-men.

Indeed, deep differences on defence and intellectual property may kybosh the US-EU free-trade deal (along with farmers and other lobbies). But it is still worth pushing for. It would not just boost economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic. It would also show that the ‘West’ (for want of a better term) is still in business.

It is particularly important given how little else is going on in transatlantic relations. In the State Department, the engines seem to have been switched off at the end of the last administration, with the ignition key locked away in a deserted basement. Senior positions are unfilled. Ambassadors and spokespeople do their bit on an ad hoc basis, but no overall message is audible.

The Pentagon, which has done a lot of the heavy-lifting in Europe in the past, is quiet too. The latest rumour (which I have yet to disprove) is that the US is planning to send only a single company of soldiers to the Steadfast Jazz military exercise in Poland and the Baltic states in the autumn. Given that the real point of this exercise is to prove that NATO is serious about the territorial defence of its most vulnerable members, that would be an odd signal to send.

Russia policy (supposedly run from the White House) remains a black hole. The ‘re-set’ is in ruins, epitomised by the US’s meek failure to protest when the Kremlin closed USAID’s offices last

year. Since then, Russia has continued with ostentatiously nasty and hostile words and deeds, including a nuclear-bomber ‘training mission’ near Guam. The administration continues to drag its feet on the ‘Magnitsky List’, which would ban the officials involved in the killing of the auditor Sergei Magnitsky and in the $230 million (€177m) fraud against the Russian taxpayer that he uncovered. But it shows no sign of having an alternative strategy towards Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

To be fair, bits of the US government still play humblingly close attention to corners of the continent that European governments shamefully neglect. It is probably easier to discuss Moldova seriously in Washington, DC than it is in Berlin, Brussels, London or Paris. But high-level attention is limited and Europe has little claim to it. Deservedly so, some might say.